Microsoft Health App Prize Goes To Nova Southeastern

Contest for Windows 8 apps that link to Microsoft HealthVault was won by a pharmacy college team investigating consumer health apps.

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Researchers from Nova Southeastern University studying consumer healthcare technologies won a contest sponsored by Microsoft for best new app using its HealthVault service and Windows 8.

Microsoft introduced its HealthVault personal health record service in 2007, and it has grown into one of the leaders in its category, promoted through partnerships with organizations such as AARP. Users can authorize the app to pull data from healthcare providers and pharmacy services so it is aggregated in one place. Microsoft has created a HealthVault app for Windows 8 and ran a contest this summer to encourage other developers to create apps that would tap into HealthVault as a back-end data service.

The winning team was led by Zaher Hajar, a research fellow with the Center for Consumer Health Informatics Research, part of the College of Pharmacy at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, in partnership with developers from Techmind, a small software development shop from Poland specializing in Windows mobile technologies. The concept was developed at Nova, but the coding was done by Techmind. The prize was for an early prototype of their app, called Health eConnect, which is designed to gather data from other health monitoring devices and present it in the app in an easy to understand way. The prototype, produced in just a month, featured the example of working with wireless home health devices for monitoring blood pressure, which are now inexpensively available.

Because consumers can configure HealthVault to access their pharmacy records from major chains such as Walgreens and CVS, the Health eConnect app works with the cloud service to correlate changes in blood pressure with information about drug interactions and side effects and present this information to the consumer in an intelligible way. Hajar envisions the app also taking in information from glucometers, pedometers, and other gadgets and providing consumers with "clues about their health."

The team was awarded $10,000, a Microsoft Surface Pro, and status as a Microsoft preferred partner for Windows 8 development for the next two years.

"The prize is not as important as the other elements," Hajar said. Winning the contest means Microsoft will work with the informatics center as a coach, so that the final version of the app will be ready to launch in the Windows 8 app store by the end of the year, he said. Microsoft will also waive some of its standard fees for listing an app.

Nova's Health eConnect app.

The Surface Pro is a Microsoft-made tablet computer, still struggling to find its market, and this contest is one way of promoting its potential uses in healthcare.

Hajar said the informatics center had "a particular interest" in developing mobile health apps for Windows, "which is not tapped into as much, compared with the Apple operating system." The app initially targets Windows 8 tablets, although the developers also hope to bring it to Windows phones.

"The phone is a natural outlet because of its ubiquity, and it also allows integration into other wireless devices," said Kevin Clauson, an associate professor of pharmacy and director of the consumer informatics center. The center was established two years ago with the mission of studying, and contributing to the trend toward "participatory medicine" in which patients take greater control over their own healthcare, he said.

Windows phones are not as ubiquitous as iPhones or Android phones, but the Nova group made a specific decision to focus on the Windows platform, which is of interest to many healthcare organizations because of the potential for integration with other Windows-based technologies, Clauson said.

Hajar said his team of developers will work on getting the app working for Windows 8 initially, but he concedes that to make the service truly useful it should also be available on other platforms. "You have to follow the market, and what's in the patient's hands," he said.

The Microsoft contest winners were announced late last month at Health 2.0 News, which cosponsored the contest. Entries were judged on creativity and innovation, potential to promote patient engagement, use of Windows 8 features, and their ability to demonstrate meaningful integration with HealthVault.

Windows 8 on windows tablets is a really terrible operating system that impedes basic computer tasks such as opening applications, using two applications on the same screen, cut, copy, paste and file management. All basic functions are hidden and there is absolutely no organization to the interface. The data entry errors it will create in a critical healthcare environment are incredibly dangerous.

I don't really see it being used much if at all in any practices I have been to. Most physicians prefer the iPad not only for its ease of use, but because of the range of apps that are constantly being produced for it. That and coupled with the fact that Windows 8 isn't really a great operating system and has been underperforming in the market itself, and I don't really see them getting much traction.